emusic Review

I was not happy with emusic at all.  My little brother got an mp3 player as a gift, and it came with a certificate for 50 free downloads from emusic.  First of all, the certificate was a bit misleading, as in the small print (and when you get to the website), you find out that it's not really just free downloads with no strings attached.  It is free trial month that you have to sign up for the service and then cancel before the next month to not be charged.    It should have just been honest and said that part up front, instead of trying to make it sound like freebies.  If it had been for me, I would have stopped right there and never given emusic the time of day, but my little brother is only 10 years old, so rather than try and explain the situation and why I wasn't going to load 50 songs on his new player that night like I promised, I just decided to go ahead and sign up and give it a try. 

I use itunes primarily at home for filling my husband's ipod.  I used to use Sony Connect before it shut down.  I love both of those services.  I love the ease of having all that music available for dowload quickly and easily.  I figured that emusic would be just like that.  I figured wrong.  Where itunes has pretty much anything I've ever been trying to find available, emusic had next to none of it.  If I stump itunes, it's a rarity.  With emusic, out of the couple of hundred songs we wanted to buy, only ONE was available.  And I wasn't looking for anything obscure.  No crazy bands that no one but a handful of music nuts has heard of.  It was mostly essential hits that should have been very easy to find.  Like a lot of the stuff he wanted was classic rock chart-toppers that he'd heard on the Guitar Hero games.  Some of the other songs he was looking for were really popular mainstream Top 40 type current rock stuff.  My brother, my step-father, and I were all naming and searching for songs for like 3 or 4 hours and only found one single song out of all of them on emusic (by it's original artist, we managed to find a handful that were cover versions by other bands (and most of them not very faithful to the original artist at all)).  I was frustrated and disappointed,but I thought I would be able to just find him 50 songs on there and then immediately cancel the lousy subscription that night.  I couldn't even find 50 tracks worth downloading for free! 

Also, I don't know if was just that my mother's computer runs on Vista so it works different, maybe it's not like that on other operating systems, but to even hear the sample sound clips of songs, you had to download them.  No just clicking on it and the clip plays.  You had to download it to your computer, then play it back.  How inconvenient!  Especially because most of the songs were things you'd never heard of or obscure cover versions of popular songs instead of the artist you're familiar with, you need to listen to the clip to see if it's something you want or not. 

I hated emusic.  The worst music downloading site I've ever seen.  I cancelled my subscription and will never be back.